DevFest Nantes 2019: Storybook to create a design system

A beautiful challenge with my colleague and friend Michèle Legait: talk at DevFest Nantes, to present our research on Storybook to build a design system.

We both organize talks with FLUPA and RivieraDev, for speakers from all around the country; but at some point, you also have things to share that are worse to go on stage. What a great experience! Our talk went to Nantes, Strasbourg, Paris and probably other places in the future...

Talks are a great way to share your findings, but most of it, it is an opportunity to learn even more!

After this talk, we had even more questions than when we started! We discovered that many peers were trying to solve the same problematic. This is great material to continue, because we can feel we are on the right track!

Here is how it all started...

1. The first FLUPA meetup in Sophia

At that time, I was working at Amadeus and I was deeply involved in the setting up of a common Design System for all products in the company. We had several challenges, but still we believed it was worse to push for it.

The challenges

- A small team from different departments

- A side project for most of the participants

- A risk of bottleneck when it comes to launch it at the company level

- A home-made tool to deliver the solution

But nevertheless, we had something to show. First internally, then at FLUPA meetup where the whole team had the opportunity to share findings and challenges with the meetup participants.

Michèle came to this meetup and seemed pretty interested by the possibilities. But of course, she pointed out all the challenges that we had... with no particular answers yet.

2. Eureka!!!

Three months later she was super excited, as she just found a post on Medium: Storybook was releasing a new add-on Docs to define guidelines inside Storybook. We had a start!

I would define the needs and she would try to build the design system completely inside Storybook. And it worked! We found solutions for almost every challenges.

- It is not a small team but every teams who could maintain the design system

- It would no more be a side project

- No more bottleneck risk

- Storybook is a tool supported by a large community (Github)

3.On the way to Nantes

Our talk has been selected for DevFest Nantes, one of the biggest development conference in France. We were thrilled and scared!!! But it was time to go on stage.

We had great feedback there, but the most important: we realized that many others were dealing with the same challenges... mostly organisational.

Here are the outcomes:

- Storybook is a tool for developers

- Designers don't have access to the development environment

- They would need to write in MDX (markdown) that could be a serious constraint to use the tool.

- More generally, building a Design System takes time. It is an investment companies may not want to make.

We need to find new answers...

4. On the way to Paris

A couple of months later, we present our talk to a new audience. But we have done our homework! We discovered ZeroHeight and Invision DSM.

These tools are alternatives to the plugin Docs inside Storybook, but they connect with all the design and dev tools. Amazing!

That day, we conclude with different options depending on the company context. But we keep going and we will be able to bring some more meat on the Design System table pretty soon!

Stay tuned!!!

If you want to have a look at the conference in French, have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3RX9sJvyIA&list=PLuZ_sYdawLiUjPGPsOvBcgBxC6yP_HSA6&index=52&t=0s